On the show today is Philip Metres, whose new book, Fugitive/Refuge, was published last month by Copper Canyon. Metres’ book, I don’t think it’s too overreaching to say, is a monumental collection of poems that moves between his family’s personal history as refugees from Lebanon, into Mexico, and then finally the United States, in the early part of the 20th century, and our recent refugee crises—those fleeing wars in Syria and Afghanistan, and while written before, it is of course reflective of the situation now in Gaza.
Metres is a great essayist and thinker about poetry, and I really enjoyed working with him on some of his essays for The Writer’s Chronicle, when I worked there. This was a terrific conversation, and I hope you all enjoy it!
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Philip Metres is the author of twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (Copper Canyon 2024), Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan, 2018), Sand Opera (Alice James, 2015), and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State, 2015). His work—poetry, translation, essays, fiction, criticism, and scholarship—has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Watson Foundation. He is the recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. He lives with his family in Cleveland, Ohio.
Pick up a copy of Fugitive/Refuge here.
Read more about Philip Metres.
There are some other great interviews with Metres out there. Give a listen to the Poetry Foundation’s recent Off the Shelf Podcast with him, and read an interview in Commonweal magazine.
Do take a look at his essay on LitHub: “Dispatches from the Land of Erasure During a Genocide.”
Coming soon on the podcast:
A new Sidebar episode featuring the too-little known poet Barbara Jordan! Also interviews with Kevin Prufer, Callie Siskel, and Ross White.
Some notes:
One little extra thing I really like about Metres’ poem, “Entre Naranjos,” is it reminds me a bit of my own poem, “Orange,” (published in Radiation King) which plays with the notion that it’s a word without a rhyme.
So here it is, if you’d like to read it.
Orange
My children love the taste of orange.
They like it flooding chins, the orange
Juice dripping, sticking, tickling. Orange
To flavor chocolate candy, orange
To scent their mother’s hair. The orange
Crayon is just a stub, they orange
Color everything they see orange.
Their teacher stocks special orange
Chalk for them—they concentrate on orange
Problems better, take one orange
Away from a crate and orange
How many do you have? The orange
Walls of their room are orange and orange.
The neighbors call them sunrise orange
And sunset orange. There would be no orange
Living without their love and orange
We do what love requires orange.
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About your host: Jason Gray is the author of the poetry books Radiation King (Idaho Prize for Poetry) and Photographing Eden (Hollis Summers Prize), and his poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and Image. His career in publishing has brought him to the university presses of Ohio State and Wisconsin, and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
A note on the podcast title. I am an unabashed fan of The Simpsons, and in Season 8, Episode 9 “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer),” Marge attempts to stop Homer from going to the local chili cook-off, because, as she says, every time he does, he “get[s] drunk as a poet on payday.” And that has made me laugh for decades now.
I in no way endorse getting oneself overserved and behaving like a jackass, poetic or otherwise. And if you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, there are resources for you: Alcoholics Anonymous Al-Anon